signal wasn’t off. I shouted to him. But ‘e was all dazed like.”

I returned to the train full of a horrible desire to see with my own eyes a certain corpse. Bit by bit the breakdown gang had removed the whole of the centre part of the shattered carriage. I thrust myself into the group, and — we all looked at each other. Nobody, alive or dead, was to be found.

“He, too, must have got out at Sittingbourne,” I said at length.

“Ay!” said the guard.

My heard swam, dizzy with dark imaginings and unspeakable suspicions. “He has escaped; he is alive!” I muttered savagely, hopelessly. It was as if a doom had closed inevitably over me. But if my thoughts had been legible